


a prison of bones

by tea_tales_and_whales



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Mild Gore, Spoilers for Dishonored 2, Spoilers for The Brigmore Witches, post-DLC
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-07-19
Packaged: 2018-02-09 12:43:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1983468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tea_tales_and_whales/pseuds/tea_tales_and_whales
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She doesn’t know how long she has languished in this self-created prison, this exile of her own doing, for her hair doesn’t grey and her limbs do not wither and she wants not for food or water. She sleeps only to pass the seeming aeons that press on her writhing thoughts."</p><p>Formerly titled, "It's a Long Way to Redemption," this work continues with a return to Delilah's past, to the time when she and Jessamine were young girls and as close as sisters and the sad tale that followed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a prison of bones

Worlds exist beyond the boundaries built by the frame of a painting. A vivid landscape on canvas is but a fragment of the view once caught in the eye of the artist who sought to mire it as a boat to shore, a mere testament to a memory soon lost as it became reduced to a picture which failed to truly reflect its original majesty.

But not here.

Here, the world is as it is built from the minds that lose themselves in the endless sea of blue, and the woman who slumps in the shadow of a great tree - its boughs alight with tendrils of livid green that coil towards the leaden clouds above - did not think she would need a bigger world than what she daubed onto her canvas in thick chalky hues, the pigment rich with sweat and bone dust.

Here, time is nothing. It has never existed and never will.

She doesn’t know how long she has languished in this self-created prison, this exile of her own doing, for her hair doesn’t grey and her limbs do not wither and she wants not for food or water. She sleeps only to pass the seeming aeons that press on her writhing thoughts.

The first few hours she tried and tried again to claw her way back into the world she could no longer reach, where a scarred, red-breasted man awaited her tooth and nail; she would peel his skin from wet-gleaming sinew and sew it into a mantle, crack his bones and slurp out the marrow, dig his heart from his chest and rip into it like a sweet Morley apple.

She failed.

After that, she screamed, bloody vengeance crackling along the seams of howls hurled furiously into the uncaring mists below the precipitous jags of grey stone. Her rage was bestial and were she more than a match for her island she would have torn it to shreds and swallowed it all, jaws cracking on marble arch and her own bitter defeat.

The black-eyed boy does not heed her cries, though it is a long, long time - after her throat is raw and her lips flecked with blood and foam - until she no longer screams. It is longer still until she sobs raspily, fingers grasping at the roots of the great tree, dead-eyed though tears funnel through the furrows she clawed into her own cheeks when her fury could do naught but seek release through the splitting of her own skin.

The gouges have scabbed over now, but the rents in her pride still ooze and fester, blacken further the heart that beats stubbornly in her chest.

Madness takes her briefly and only once, clouds all reason until all she can see is naught but an endless sentence in the pale abyss where her mind will rot long before her body. She throws herself from the edge of her floating isle without another thought, closes her eyes against the whip of the wind sailing past. She is free-

\- until shock jolts through her frame, from the soles of her feet pushing air hard from her lungs out of her gasping throat, and she falls hard and breathlessly onto her knees on the ground beneath the tree.

She is silent and still as the dead for a long long time after.

There is little left of her when she begins to carve her fingers into bloody nubs against the base of the tree, gouging bark until sap bleeds in rivulets of pus-yellow down her wrists. She works sightlessly, eyes dull and long blind for lack of care, and she doesn’t even wince - though the pain is ceaseless - when thin oaken shards embed themselves in her hands, when finally her fingernails crack and splinter into the wood.

And then she idly pries away a thick scab of bark and the gleaming wetness of fresh wood beneath, pearlescent honey-white, is like pale flesh, the soft, lovely curve of a young girl’s cheek. She watches, fire sparking in the pits of her hollow eyes as a droplet of sap slowly rolls over the gentle mound. She licks it away as though it were a tear, heedless of the splinters she gathers in her tongue.

Suddenly she is the inferno crackling through her veins and she rips into the tree with the fervor of a woman possessed. The tips of her fingers are worn entirely to the bone by the time the canvas is complete but she’s far from finished.

Without a blade, the work is slow and clumsy, infuriating, but she clings to the jag of stone until her hand is raw and weeping, carefully twists it into the wood to form whorls and pits and mounds until the one sharp end is blunt and she must pry yet another stone from the earth beneath her feet.

She chews the vines and grass and luminous blossoms winding through the marble columns into various pastes of many hues, her saliva thick and viscous. The taste is sharp and vile, the juice within the plants surely poisonous, but it matters not. The fresh wood does not suck as hungrily at the poorly made dyes as dry, parched canvas but the colours stain well enough.

She digs with her ruined fingers into the earth, peels away layer after layer of mulch and soil, until she uncovers thick veins of clay, and greedily grasps handfuls of the slick, sticky sediment, daubs it here and there where need be.

It’s almost ready, and her smile is horrendous to behold, lips peeled back from the gums to reveal a dreadful rictus of green-stained teeth, until she reaches into her own mouth to wrench the molars free. These, she grinds into powder, mixes with blood and sweat and tree sap and smooths out a sinuous twist of red lips with the stroke of a finger.

It is finished…but it’s not right.

The skin is shades too pale. The arch of the brow too high, the nose too fine and straight. The intractable gaze that sears into her soul does not belong to a set of honeyed hazel eyes, worn by grief and weary far beyond callow years, but blue ones as bright as the sun dancing on waves whipped into gaiety by a summer breeze. The eyes of one that never knew true sorrow.

The full mouth is best, is the only accuracy besides the dark wash of hair and the arch of the cheekbones, but their curve is too broad and mischievous. It’s a mouth that has borne the painter’s own name in times past and once spoke gleefully of a friendship with a simple kitchen girl, the baker’s apprentice.

Jessamine Kaldwin, the girl, stares implacably out of the makeshift painting, and Delilah curls into the ground, clutches what’s left of her ruined hands to her chest, heart heavy with loss, and howls.


End file.
